Midnight Pool now available on N-Gage

The 3D simulator Midnight Pool is now available in the N-Gage application's showroom. If you can't see it, click on the headline for instructions on how to make it appear.

1. If you can't see Midnight Pool on the list of latest games, try clicking "Options" and then "Update Now".

2. If you still can't see Midnight Pool, try clicking on "Available Games" and scroll right to the bottom of the list.

3. If you can't see Midnight Pool on "Available Games" either, exit the N-Gage app, open the web browser, select "Options", then "Clear Privacy Data", then "Clear Cache", then exit the web browser and launch the N-Gage app. Midnight Pool should then appear on the "Available Games" list.

Google Mobile gets a makeover

I'd noticed new icons for the elements in Google's Mobile services homepage yesterday but hadn't thought any more of it - it turns out that each element has had a new intro page written, explaining the difference between the download and web-based versions. As ever, try it at m.google.com - screenshots below.

Some of the pages are still a bit glitchy and if you follow the wrong path you end up back at the old version of the pages, but doubtless Google will sort this out during the day!

Keep your S60 phone 'Fresh'

No apologies for the blatant plug, but PiZero's done it again. Fresh is an awesome theme for all S60 3rd Edition phones that's gone straight to the top of my hit parade. It's pretty, useable in light and dark conditions, bright enough to be used as a flashlight in the dark etc. Give Fresh a try.

Brain Genius 2

Train your Brain everyday. Brain Genius 2 is similar like Brain Age on Nintendo DS.

Download File here
Brain Genius 2

The Incredible Hulk - The Game

From The Movie now come to your Hands. The Incredible Hulk - The Game take you to the world of Hulk. Play and discover his power.

Download File here
The Incredible Hulk - The Game

Rome Throne of Destiny

You will love this adventure game. Rome Throne of Destiny will bring adventure from Rome to your hands. Enjoy the game.

Download File here
Rome Throne of Destiny

'Celebrity Family Feud' is a waste of space

While "The Feud" has a real if modest place in game-show history. Maybe it should consider staying there.

This new edition, featuring celebrity-led families and hosted by Al Roker, does its best to stay lively and a little bit naughty.

But there just isn't all that much going on.

For one thing, the guests feel recycled. Because they are. Well over half have done "reality" shows recently, and while it's probably easier for producers to use performers who know how TV works, there's a point at which we simply don't need to see Wayne Newton, Vincent Pastore or Deion Sanders again.

Ever.

For those just tuning in, "Family Feud" works like this. The show's staff has asked 100 random people to answer an amusing question like "What would you most not want to see your father wearing?" or to finish a phrase like "Holy (blank)."

Two teams of contestants then try to guess what those respondents said, and that's where the fun is penciled in. Did most people say "Holy Bible" or "Holy smokes"? Or was it a third option that Melissa Rivers suggests?

Like many venerable TV games, "The Feud" lets viewers shout out the answers. But even that, and even the adrenaline that starts to pump when the celebrity family shoots for a possible $50,000, isn't enough to make the show much more than a way to kill a spare half-hour.

What doesn't help, curiously, is the "celebrity team" concept, because it means we get one or maybe two celebrities and then their spouses, parents, children, siblings or friends.

So most of the guesses come from people we've never heard of, which kills much of the show's promised celebrity spark.

For the record, the two matchups tonight are the Ice-T family and Joan Rivers' family, then the Raven-Symoné family versus Newton's family.

For the further record, several members of each family will not be applying for Mensa membership anytime soon.

True, it's not easy to focus on even simple, common-sense matters while TV cameras are in your face, and true also, hearing stupid answers is part of the fun.

But it's not a promising sign when a show sometimes feels like it has been revived in part to keep a few dozen underemployed celebrities off the streets.

Nokia E71 - Multimedia

Now, I know at this point the Eseries marketing people are going to leap up from their chairs and say 'But you can't do a feature on Eseries multimedia - that's not what we built the device around!' However, talking to the same marketing people at the E71 launch revealed that a significant number Eseries devices sold so far have, as far as they can tell, been to private customers rather than businesses. Doubtless these customers had their professional needs in mind, but the fact remains that there are still a lot of people who want an Eseries phone for its own merits and not just because some IT manager bought a job lot to integrate with his precious email server.

Merits which include extra solid (usually metal-based) casings, large batteries and clear screens in all light conditions. Oh, and (sometimes) qwerty keyboards. There's a lot to like, which is why the likes of the E51, E61i and, yes, even the E90 have sold well across the world.

But however professional the user, they'll want to take photos sometimes, they'll want to take short videos, if only because their smartphone is their only device - or at least the only device they're likely to take everywhere. So it does matter how good or bad the camera unit is on the E71, in this case. There must be a lot of people with older Nseries S60 phones who really fancy the qwerty thumb keyboard and huge battery but are unsure whether their photos are going to take a turn for the worse.

Likewise, music playback is now universal, even if it's just for casual listening on the 30 minute commute, twice a day. And video playback is becoming more common, albeit usually in streaming 'on demand' form. So how well does the new E71 cope with all these extra non-business tasks? Let's find out.

Photography

As mentioned in the review, I have to admit to being a little disappointed by the camera - I'd been hoping for the same 3.2 megapixel unit that featured in the E90. Instead, we get a small lensed 3.2mp camera (to bang the gong yet again - it's not all about how many megapixels a camera has) with comparatively cheap optics and sensor. You can see in the examples here (click to open full-size) that in bright conditions contrast is handled relatively poorly. Indoors, the images are digitally noisy, even with the LED flash, as you'd expect from such a small lens. No worse than in the cameras in many other smartphones, but worse than the E90's camera and a lot worse than that in the likes of the N95.

Testing out the focussing in indoor conditions, artificial lighting

From the review: "Focussing itself is handled in semi-automatic fashion and I'm somewhat impressed by how much flexibility this gives the user. Previously a smartphone user had to choose between a focussing camera for which you had to wait a second or so for focussing and for which you really needed a static subject, and a non-focussing camera that was great for instant shots (i.e. it didn't need to wait and focus) but for which anything close was blurry. With the E71, you can press the D-Pad to take an instant shot or press the 't' key (beneath the D-Pad) to focus if needed, after which you then press the D-Pad to snap, etc. I thought I'd hate this solution but in fact it's proven very flexible - you really do get the best of both worlds."

The above samples were taken with a view to finding the limits of the E71 camera. Here are some more general photo samples from the E71, with comments:

Another generic photo that comes out quite well. If you zoom in too closely,
you start to see all sorts of typical digital artefacts, but viewing this on
a computer screen or on photo paper will please most people in terms
of ad-hoc snaps

What I was especially interested in was comparing the E71's 3 megapixel images, taken with cheap optics and sensor, with 3mp images taken by the Nokia N95 (in 3mp mode, obviously), with its Carl Zeiss optics, larger lens and better CMOS sensor. When I took the photos above, I also took the identical scene with the N95 and then zoomed in to 1:1 level to compare detail in the photos from the E71 and N95:

This enlargement, more than any other, shows the importance of proper optics and quality sensor. The E71's photo,
while good enough for most people, doesn't look natural - you'd think it was a colour photocopy of an original,
for example. In addition, there's lots of edge enhancement and sharpening, which naturally falls down horribly
on things like grassy fields and trees.

The biggest disappointment of the imaging side of the E71 is that the old, old version of Gallery is used - this is slow, unattractive and klunky and I can see no good reason why it's still here in mid 2008.

Camcorder

For video recording, capture is at the new 'phone' standard of QVGA at 15 frames per second (i.e. YouTube-friendly), although the optics are pretty good for this sort of work and the captured soundtrack is of much higher quality than similar video-recording phones and smartphones. Again though, video recording seems a little weak compared to the E90 (let alone the Nseries super-multimedia-phones).

Video

Multimedia on 'Enterprise'-aimed S60 devices has always lagged a little behind the cutting edge and the E71 is no exception. But, to cut it some slack, it's a lot better than on the clunky old E61i. Media handling generally is slightly crippled by a slow implementation of USB, working out at around 1MB/second, or about 10Mbps. However, slow file transfers won't be a huge issue for many typical Eseries users, who arguably tend not to swap their music and video collections around as often as, say, someone with an N95.

Video playback now includes H.264 support, so most MP4 videos will play without problem. I did notice some jerkiness occasionally (there are no fancy 3D graphics chips to help out here, as on the N95, for example) and suspect that there's still some fine tuning to do under the hood for future firmwares. Video on the E71 is still watchable though. Video through Flash Lite 3 on the likes of YouTube is occasionally interrupted by brief pauses while the E71's processor catches up decoding the downloaded data stream.

I got similar results from the third party Mobitubia, although this performed better by letting the video download in its entirety and then playing aftwards, when the processor was less loaded.

Music

Music playback is now very good and the E71 as been brought bang up to date in this regard. Using quality headphones (I was trying the BH-101 Bluetooth stereo headset), there's lovely frequency support and volume. Playback via the supplied stereo (2.5mm) headset was acceptable but I liked keeping 'Bass booster' on in the built-in Equaliser in order to hear bass frequencies better. I also tried with a set of Ultimate Ears, with similar results. As we've remarked numerous times recently, music reproduction quality on smartphones is now dependent on how you encode it and on what sort of headphones you listen - the actual device is almost irrelevant.

Absolutely no complaints in this department.

Global Picture and Information Archieve

FREE archive of photos for thousands of VIP personalities, political characters, artists, economists, actress, actors, and more. In addition, you can search global information through the net with this software that connects to encyclopedias and search engines. HAVE IT FREE of charge!

Compatible Devices
LG KS10, Motorola RIZR Z8, Nokia 3250, Nokia 5500, Nokia 5700, Nokia 6110, Nokia 6120, Nokia 6290, Nokia 7710, Nokia 9200 Series Communicator, Nokia 9210 Communicator, Nokia 9290 Communicator, Nokia 9300, Nokia 9500, Nokia E50, Nokia E60, Nokia E61, Nokia E61i, Nokia E62, Nokia E65, Nokia E70, Nokia E90, Nokia N71, Nokia N73, Nokia N75, Nokia N76, Nokia N77, Nokia N80, Nokia N91, Nokia N92, Nokia N93, Nokia N93i, Nokia N95, Samsung SGH-i520, Sony Ericsson M600i, Sony Ericsson P1, Sony Ericsson P990, Sony Ericsson W950i

Download File here

Toilet-paper wedding dress debuts in loo

The bride, Jennifer Cannon, wore a dress made of toilet paper for her marriage to Doy Nichols at a public toilet in Times Square.

Guests failed to note what material was used for the groom's suit.

Cheap-Chic-Weddings.com sponsored the 2007 Toilet Paper Wedding Dress Contest and the winner was Hanah Kim.

Designer Kim made Jennifer's dress with seemingly endless details.

This made the dress look, at first glance, like a mainstream wedding gown made of real fabric.

The ceremony was in Charmin Restrooms - temporary, free public toilets arranged for the day.

The newlyweds from Lexington, Kentucky, exited through a shower of confetti made from, you guessed it, shredded toilet paper.

Chinese Checkers Heroes

For a moment I was worried that I was going to have to sit down to read up on some complicated strategy and spend forever learning a new game – but within moments of opening Five Deer’s latest leisure application (Chinese Checkers Heroes) I realised I was being a bit silly. Because I was thinking of the beast that is Chinese Chess. In the same way that the speed and simplicity of Draughts is to the depth and complexity of Chess, Chinese Checkers is the same to Chinese Chess.

Obvious in hindsight, I know.


In Chinese Checkers, you play on a six pointed star with intermediate points, and the winner is the player who gets their ten marbles (which start grouped together in one point of the star) into the point opposite them - which is where their opposition usually starts. Of course with six points in the star, you can have up to six players in the game, so it can get pretty furious in a heated competition.

Moving is also fast and fortunes can change quickly. The basic move is to slide one piece one point on the board, and the first few moves will be like that. But then, just like the traditional game of draughts, you can jump over pieces. Unlike draughts, you don’t ‘capture’ any enemy pieces - so they stay on the board, and you can also jump over your own pieces. And if you find yourself able to jump again at the end of the first jump, you can keep chaining them together in any direction (including backwards and sideways). In this way, one piece can move a long way.

And that’s before you add in the ‘long jumping’ ability. As long as your path is clear, you can jump over a distant piece. So if you have your piece, a blank space, another playing piece, a blank space, and then a further blank space, you can jump and land in that second space – as long as it’s (a) symmetrical and (b) you’re only jumping over one playing piece at a time. On my first game I watched aghast as even the basic computer AI chained huge jumps together and sprinted across the board to me – on my second game I had it cracked.

That’s the key to Chinese Checkers right there – the very shallow learning curve lets you play a challenging game within about ten minutes of picking up the title, even if like me you’d never played Chinese Checkers in anger before. And the fact that I’ve not had to mention any problems with the programming yet is testament to the skill of Five Deer. Everything is intuitive, there’s very little lag or thinking time, and the five computer AI players all have different personalities in the game.

Being on a hexagonal (ish) grid, the regular d-pad controls aren’t going to work without a headache, but no matter. With ten playing pieces, the application numbers them so you just need to hit the keypad to select which piece to move. All the valid moves are then shown (great for practising spotting your long jumps!) and d-pad left and right cycles through the available moves – of which there can be a lot when you get further into the game.

Being on a hexagonal (ish) grid, the regular d-pad controls aren’t going to work without a headache, but no matter. With ten playing pieces, the application numbers them so you just need to hit the keypad to select which piece to move. All the valid moves are then shown (great for practising spotting your long jumps!) and d-pad left and right cycles through the available moves – of which there can be a lot when you get further into the game.

I like this application, not because it’s flashy, not because it does anything particularly different, put because it presents the game of Chinese Checkers, and gets everything else out the way except playing the game. That’s not as easy as it sounds, and Five Deer should be commended for another easy to use and intuitive slice of fun. Definitely recommended.

I like this application, not because it’s flashy, not because it does anything particularly different, put because it presents the game of Chinese Checkers, and gets everything else out the way except playing the game. That’s not as easy as it sounds, and Five Deer should be commended for another easy to use and intuitive slice of fun. Definitely recommended.

AAS Podcast #80: AAS Insight #29 - Of Apples, Nokias and Cloud Computing

A slightly different spin on the podcast this week, partly because we replaced Steve with Ricky Cadden (for this week only) but mainly because someone thought it would be a good for Ewan to do the show after a gallon of espresso...

Topics covered, but not limited to:

* An Evening with S60 in Boston.
* The LG KT610 Clam-shell smart phone.
* iGoogle and the new Google Reader for S60.
* Cloud Computing and Social Services, as we discuss the relative merits of Apple's MobileMe and Nokia's Ovi.
* What's up with the games on the N-Gage platform.
* And I think we discuss some new phone from an American manufacturer in Cupertino...

Download MP3 File here

Nokia E71 - Review

Too much plastic?

Like most people, watching Steve Jobs unveil the original Apple iPhone was something that stuck in my memory, in particular for the way he utterly (and somewhat unfairly) dismissed the current generation of qwerty-thumb-keyboarded smartphones, declaring them to have "too much plastic". His point was that you'd get on better having the whole front surface as display and let individual applications use the real estate as they saw fit. An innovative notion and one which works very well for the iPhone. But the continuing popularity of the Blackberry/Treo form factor shows that, especially when someone's banging out text messages and emails all day, in trains, buses, walking down the road, you really can't beat the tactile nature and satisfaction of a real keyboard - however small.

Steve Jobs' original comparison slide showed the Nokia E62, the model of the day in the USA, which suffered from low RAM, a slowish processor and a fiddly joystick. The E61i then appeared, to all intents and purposes a bit of a cosmetic upgrade, with thinner form and a 2 megapixel camera, but the core performance problem remained. The E51 and E90 appeared, with new styling, with S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1 under the hood and snappier performance all round, plus up to date media codecs. And now we have the E71, combining (hopefully) the best of the E61 form factor with the size (almost) and speed of the E51 and the software package from the E90 plus some new tricks of its own - the perfect smartphone?



After all, you can bang out SMS/emails on this device, but there's a lot more under the hood and the E71 looks to be a fairly good all rounder. The S60 implementation used is still a little under-powered at times, most notably when opening images and playing back videos, but it's fine for everyday productivity and general mobile computing.

In some ways the E71 is the iPhone's nemesis - using almost the identical dimensions in a totally different way, for a totally different set of users. The iPhone excels at media consumption (Music/photos/video/web), while the E71's strengths are in media creation (typing documents, Office work, camera, camcorder, and so on - the usual Nokia/S60 strengths). Both devices can do most of what the other does, just not as well. The attempted crossover is evidenced by the iPhone 2 platform adding enterprise features while the E71 now plays DRMed WMA music, etc. Then there are the starkly different form factors. And the different target markets (personal vs company use). Add in the elegantly-simple- but-not-as-deep UI of the iPhone compared to the useable but-you-need-to-be-fairly-tech-savvy-to-find-everything approach for S60 on the E71, and I can only emphasise once again that they're polar opposites.

From E61 to E71

As you can see, the form factor's been on a diet over the last two years - the E71 has been a long time coming but the new size (112mm high by 57mm wide by a mere 11mm thick) is a huge improvement overall.




The downsides are a) that you need to perform even more finger gymnastics in order to type on the (45mm from q to p) tiny thumb keyboard - the E71 really isn't going to be good for those with big hands, and b) that the screen has had to be down-specced to 2.4" - you'll remember that the original E61/E61i design had a massive 2.8" screen. Those two aspects apart though, it's up, up, all the way.



The upgrades, then: the camera's now 3.2 megapixels with optional auto-focus and LED flash (the E61i was 2mp with no focus or flash), the processor seems to be a good 50% faster (based on timing web page and image rendering, although the inclusion of demand paging also helps here) and the free RAM has been tripled. In addition, the use of S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1 has made things smoother and nippier at all turns - with the inclusion of up to date audio and video codecs, including H.264 and WMA, notably.



For most people, the smaller and lighter device, together with the spec upgrades, will be compelling - but the downsizing of screen and key size are still well worth noting if these are important to you.

Around the aforementioned screen (transflective, very bright and readable, even doing adequately in sunlight) and miniature keyboard are comparative acres of mirror-finish metal (spot the unit I'm shooting photos with, below), looking stylish but rather prone to fingerprints. The phone microphone is of high quality but is embedded in this front surface, which means that any video you shoot later will have slightly skewed sound - not a huge problem, but, again, worth noting.



The keys themselves are terrific, despite the miniscule size, with good feel and travel. Using my standard typing speed test, the E71 came out at around 28 words per minute, roughly the same as its predecessor, the E61, with the larger keyboard - considering the reduced form factor, this is pretty decent, although the smaller key spacing does mean that for some letter combinations you'll get your fingers in a muddle. In use, the keyboard reminded me strongly of that of a Palm Treo - and given that this is the gold standard in thumb keyboards, this should be taken as a compliment(!) In addition, there's a new word completion system, see below for more on this.



I'm fine with most of the keyboard layout, but have to take issue with 'Ctrl', whose use I get the impression Nokia are trying to deprecate. It's now a 'Fn' keypress (above 'Chr'), so to do 'Ctrl-X', for example, you actually have to press three keys at once, really tricky on something so small. Disappointing.

As with the E51, the 'S60 menu' key is now a 'Home' icon - a change I like a lot, plus there are shortcut keys for Calendar, Contacts and Email - and, even better, you can define extra apps to switch to/launch for long presses on each shortcut key. So, for example, a long press on Contacts might bring up Jaiku.



The D-pad is outstanding, the best such control I've used in several years. With the screen being QVGA, there are many, many compatible games (maybe N-Gage will make an appearance here?) and having a good D-pad to work them is half the battle. In case you were hoping for a higher resolution screen, I'm with Nokia on this one - VGA in a 2.4" display is just silly and wastefully expensive. QVGA on the E71 looks crisp and good. It's only really when web browsing that you'll come a cropper - as usual with S60 Web in such a low resolution display.



Around the sides of the E71 are: Top: power button and mono speaker (good volume and quality). Left: microSD slot, microUSB port (the E61i was Pop-port, so the E71 has leapfrogged the miniUSB standard completely!). Bottom: charging port. Right: Volume up/down, voice recording button, standard 2.5mm 4-way stereo headset jack.



Most of the E71's rear is metal, with a patterned mirror finish, with the camera module adding a couple of mm to the 11mm basic thickness in a little bump, featuring a tiny camera, a LED flash and an aiming mirror - though, to be honest, the entire back forms a good enough mirror for framing yourself when talking 'to camera'.

Buttons either side of the case pop off the rear cover, revealing the huge BP-4L battery, the same one as used in the E61i and E90, which will please cost-conscious (or green) companies - and 1500mAh will power the E71 for an eternity. Even with heavy Wi-Fi use and music/camera activity, the E71 will easily last a working day - and often two. Take the battery out and you appreciate just how stunningly light the E71's body is and how hard Nokia has worked to miniaturise everything. Good design, guys.



S60 Basics, S60 extensions

There's little need to describe the basics of S60 here - originally designed for one-handed use with portrait screen, it has scaled fairly well to part-time two-handed use with keyboard and landscape screen, as evidenced by the popularity of the E61 family. But it's important to note that there have been a lot of tweaks by the Eseries team to the standby screen, the OS and basic applications - and mostly for the better - I'd like to see these tweaks rolled out across other S60 devices.

The first surprise is on the standby screen, with a new ying/yang icon, marked 'Switch mode'. Modes are a new concept, based around the idea that you do different things with your smartphone at different times in your day/week. Two example modes are supplied, modelling possible standby configurations (in terms of theme, application shortcuts, standby plug-ins and wallpaper), but you can create your own and generally fiddle with your modes until the cows come home. It's a neat idea but it remains to be seen how many non-geeks get round to serious tinkering.



The number of possible standby plug-ins has increased too, to a massive 15, from Music player to Email to Calendar to Search, although only a handful can be shown at once, so you have to be quite selective - still, more choice is better than none. A new voicemail icon can be highlighted, to show a popup menu with common voicemail options at the start and then as appropriate thereafter, depending on what's waiting for you.



Of extra special interest on the standby screen is smart dialling, in that you can start tapping out the characters of a name and they'll be quick matched against your Contacts. The implementation is a little messy in that what's displayed in the main text field are the numeric characters, but the contact matching does work:



Opening the main menu shows that Nokia has done a serious job of organising the 50 or so apps and mini-apps into folders. Personally, I found it annoying and wanted to move the icons around to suit my way of working, but then that's the joy of S60, in that you can get your phone working exactly the way you want it. Dipping into the folders reveals a lot to take note of:

* A shortcut for VoIP (by default set to download Gizmo, but you can add your own).

* A tweaked version of Contacts. The old contact groups have been moved from a tab to the Options menu and pressing 'right' on a contact now brings up a pop-up menu showing the five most common ways in which you might want to get in touch with that person, e.g. voice, SMS, video call, etc. A useful UI shortcut, even a little inelegant, given the duplication of Options menu functions.



Calendar has had even more of a tweak. The month view is now split screen, E90-style, while the day screen now has an Outlook-style hourly layout - very pretty but tedious to navigate sometimes. Finally, when editing an entry, there's a new highly condensed dialog, meaning you can set more information without having to scroll down several screens worth of options, as in the old S60 Calendar.



Quickoffice is now up to v4.1, giving good Office round-tripping but without some of the extras (such as Office 2007 support) that you'd get by paying extra for the latest Quickoffice 5.0 - it's a shame that this has to be a pay-for upgrade, I really can't see why they didn't just put Quickoffice 5.0 in the ROM and send some dollars over to Quickoffice for the license - the current situation just annoys most purchasers.



There's a licensed version of Kernerman's Dictionary engine, along with links to download various language pairs for free. Given that both English and translation dictionaries are amongst the most popular third party applications, it's great to have this built in here for free.



There's a new 'Intranet' icon - the idea being that your company's IT department installs VPN settings on its devices, so that you can access its Intranet in encrypted fashion using Web. It should work fine but I wasn't able to test this.



'Encryption' is a new setting/icon for the paranoid and nothing to do with VPN. Instead, it offers on-the-fly encryption and decryption of everything in your E71's internal flash disk and/or memory card. The encryption uses your lock code as its key and, having asked for encryption, the processor gets to work on the initial changes to files, which takes a minute or two. I didn't notice a slow down in operation after encryption. In a corporate environment, with an E71 potentially stuffed with confidential documents, this encryption ability will be greatly welcomed. Sales manager lose his phone? No worries, it's fully encrypted from the eyes of even an experienced hacker. And a remote wipe is only a phone call away if needed, as extra security.



There's the Nokia Music Store client - a first for an Eseries device - whatever next? Provided you're OK with the DRM on each (WMA) track and don't intend to switch devices too often, this is a good way to buy music instantly, over the air. (Regular readers will know that I'm not big on DRM - I simply copied across a few Gigabytes of unDRMed music files from my (ripped) CD collection with the E71's microSD card in 'Mass Storage' mode)



Gallery is the same tired old application as in S60 devices three years ago. Why, oh why, hasn't Nokia's Eseries team asked the Nseries team for the code to the slick Gallery featured in every N device since the N93, over two years ago? Gallery works here, but it's not pretty and it's not pleasant.



# Messaging is another application long overdue for an update - word on the street is that this was planned for the E71 but never made it into production, a shame. At least there's a shiny new email set up wizard that queries a Nokia online database for settings - the user just enters their email address and all the rest is set up automatically - really neat and seems to work most of the time.

# Another multimedia surprise - Podcasting's preinstalled! One less app for the user to have to go off and download.



Yet another Nseries crossover - Share Online 3.0 is also preinstalled. So E71 owners will be able to take part in the great Ovi/FLickr photo-and-video-sharing-fest from the outset. With both camera and camcorder being decent on the E71, there's no reason not to take an active part and show off some really good media.



Global Race and (a fully licensed copy of) Top Hits Solitaires are included (via Download!) - after all, even Eseries users need to play - personally, I'd like to see an N-Gage client for the E71 - the hardware is up to the job. (Incidentally, the old E61 game exclusives, such as Golf Pro Contest, aren't compatible - yet)



At last - a new device with Nokia Maps 2.0 built into the ROM - every device I'd previously seen had the old v1.2 application by default. I know Nokia Maps voice navigation's subscription model has its critics, but I'm a fan - and route guidance in my hands has been at least as good as any other full 'prepaid' commercial navigation solution. The GPS antenna seems to be in the E71's top and reception was very good, similar to that on the N82. I also installed the free Google Maps and this also worked well, as expected. The landscape screen somehow seems more natural for mapping and navigation software, despite the reduced screen real estate.



The E71 does have Flash Lite 3, as with the E90's latest firmware update. Using Web, I was able to view Flash videos in YouTube and Ovi Share pages. Playback wasn't silky smooth, but it was 'good enough'.



One other innovation for the E71 (and its stablemate, the slider E66) is that when the main display is keylocked and timed out, rather than a traditional screensaver appearing, the display blanks completely. "But I need to know the time!" I hear you say. Simply press and hold the D-pad and the time appears in large letters, as shown here. A much better solution than the old non-backlit, small-fonted solution.



Impressively, full word completion (not just T9-style predictive text) has been integrated into the interface, available as a toggle in any text editing field. For fans of this system it's wonderful, though I find that it doesn't really save time - I end up wasting as much time looking up at what the system is suggesting (pressing D-pad in or space accepts the suggestion) as I would hunting for the right letters to make up the word manually. Still, useful to have and implemented well.



It's also worth noting that the way text is copied and pasted has been brought more into line with other S60 devices: as you hold down 'Shift' and highlight text, 'Copy' appears on the left function key. The old Ctrl-C method still works in most places, but won't be used as often because of the 'Ctrl' key placement.

Multimedia pretensions

Multimedia on 'Enterprise'-aimed S60 devices has always lagged a little behind the cutting edge and the E71 is no exception. But, to cut it some slack, it's a lot better than on the clunky old E61i. Media handling is slightly crippled by the use of USB 1.1, as on most other current S60 devices, although slow file transfers won't be a huge issue for many typical Eseries users, who arguably tend not to swap their music and video collections around as often as, say, someone with an N95.

Video playback now includes H.264 support, so most MP4 videos will play without problem. I did notice some jerkiness occasionally (there are no fancy 3D graphcis chips to help out here, as on the N95, for example) and suspect that there's still some fine tuning to do under the hood for future firmwares. Video on the E71 is still watchable though. Likewise music playback is now acceptable without seriously encroaching on the audio quality found in the likes of the N78, the N95 or standalone digital music players. The inclusion of a proper Equaliser was useful and I liked keeping 'Bass booster' on in order to hear bass frequencies better. In summary, media playback is fine for occasional use but you probably wouldn't choose the device for these abilities.

The E71 fares well when it comes to multimedia creation, though I have to admit to being a little disappointed by the camera - I'd been hoping for the same unit that featured in the E90. Instead, we get a small lensed 3.2mp camera (to bang the gong yet again - it's not all about how many megapixels a camera has) with comparatively cheap optics and sensor. You can see in the examples here (click to open full-size) that in bright conditions contrast is handled relatively poorly. Indoors, the images are digitally noisy, even with the LED flash, as you'd expect from such a small lens. No worse than in the cameras in many other smartphones, but worse than the E90's camera and a lot worse than that in the likes of the N95.



On the plus side, focussing is down to an incredible 4cm - great for nature shots! Focussing itself is handled in semi-automatic fashion and I'm somewhat impressed by how much flexibility this gives the user. Previously a smartphone user had to choose between a focussing camera for which you had to wait a second or so for focussing and for which you really needed a static subject, and a non-focussing camera that was great for instant shots (i.e. it didn't need to wait and focus) but for which anything close was blurry. With the E71, you can press the D-Pad to take an instant shot or press the 't' key (beneath the D-Pad) to focus if needed, after which you then press the D-Pad to snap, etc. I thought I'd hate this solution but in fact it's proven very flexible - you really do get the best of both worlds. If only the camera optics had been better, the E71 could have been a real contender in terms of day to day photography.

For video recording, capture is at the new 'phone' standard of QVGA at 15 frames per second (i.e. YouTube-friendly), although the optics are pretty good for this sort of work and the captured soundtrack is of much higher quality than similar video-recording phones and smartphones. Again though, video recording seems a little week compared to the E90 (let alone the Nseries super-multimedia-phones).

In the enterprise and open to new applications

Of course, half the power of something like the E71 is that it's fully backed up with enterprise integration software: push email solutions from half a dozen providers (including Nokia's free and rather good Mail for Exchange, which isn't actually in the firmware but is expected to be loaded, pre-configured, by your company IT department), the aforementioned Quickoffice and VPN client, plus vertical software for particular businesses written in C++, Java, Python or Ruby.

The Messaging application itself is largely unchanged from earlier devices which is something of a dissapointment given that this is a key area of the E71, especially in the light of tweaks to the Contacts and Calendar applications. While the breadth of support for different push external email solutions (Nokia Intellisync, Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, Visto Mobile, and Seven Always on Mail) and its plug-in architecture is a definite plus, this will not be a factor in day to day usage. Instead the fiddly set-up, limited folder handling, and relatively poor support for sorting, search, attachment handling and multiple email accounts may disappoint users switching from other systems.



Although I'm not part of a big company, I did load up over 20 third party applications in order to check compatibility and had no issues whatsoever - it seems that with the E61 blazing the way and then other S60 handsets like the N95 and N82 having 'landscape' modes, nearly all applications are now quite happy running 'this way' round.



120MB of flash memory makes up the internal (C:) disk and this will take some filling - it's certainly ample for all uses I can think of, with a microSD card doubtless being supplied as well for many markets and operators. If you buy the E71 SIM-free then you'll have to provide your own card, I suspect, though these are now very, very cheap.

In addition to the now ubiquitous Wi-Fi, 3.5G data and Bluetooth, there's a legacy infrared port, good to see as it's still of use for contact beaming in companies where older Palm OS and Pocket PC handhelds are found. There's also easy tethering of the E71 to company laptops, with a 'Connect PC to web' option shown when you plug in the microUSB cable - selecting this installs a new Nokia Internet application on the PC, which then handles the tethering process. It's all a little slow though - I found connecting through the standard PC Suite module to be faster.



Summarising the E71

There's a lot to really like in this latest Eseries miniaturised masterpiece. The build quality is fabulous, the styling striking (within the qwerty world, anyway), the communications options vast, text input potentially fast and flexible, the software support and built-in enterprise features almost second to none. And all in something that's as thin as your average feature phone. Which is almost certainly enough to ensure strong sales to the usual Eseries audience.

The E71 fills a very important gap in the line up of 2nd generation Eseries device. While the E90 is an extremely capable device, its form factor and price point make it rather niche. The E51 is a great entry level enterprise device, but lacks the power that a full size keyboard provides. The completed portfolio of 2nd generation Eseries devices (E51, E66, E71, E90) has a real sense of maturity about it. This comes from the hardware (variety across the range, build quality and feature set), but also the software - the enterprise applications, and crucially, the enterprise device management options have been significantly improved. The Nokia E71 and its sisters look set to give Nokia's Enterprise rivals (Blackberry and Windows Mobile - and, yes, in time the iPhone) some sleepless nights.

A tougher call is for those buying the E71 for personal use, as the smallest qwerty-equipped S60 device. While the keyboard is very useable for anyone with nimble fingers, I found the multimedia side of the E71 disappointing, from the relatively low (compared to other recent S60 mainstays like 2006's N95) camera quality to the undistinguished audio and video playback. The E71 is better than the E61i, hugely so, but in truth I'd hoped for a little bit more, given that this is now mid 2008. And yes, I know the E71 is built to come in at an attractive price, but... Don't let these slight negatives put you off investigating this great smartphone all rounder though.

The Nokia E71 is in the building.